Making a short film is a great way to create a calling card in the entertainment industry and demonstrate your point of view. Agents, managers, and producers watch short films to find up-and-coming talent. A solid festival run and/or a viral view count online can get your next project greenlit by proving your skill and that you have an audience.
These days, a short film can cost anywhere between $500 and $50,000 to make, depending on a myriad of factors. And it's no longer a surprise when a high-quality, complex short film lands closer to the $100k range, although some filmmakers continue to debate the "worthiness" of spending such a large amount on a short. Even as technology has allowed filmmaking to become more accessible over the last 25 years, inflation, of course, continues to rise. But compared to the average cost of creating a feature film, short films can be a more affordable way to showcase your talent! Here are a few examples of some notable short films, created by filmmakers who went on to make waves in Hollywood: "Peluca", the short film predecessor to Jared Hess's incredibly successful feature film "Napoleon Dynamite", cost a mere $500 to shoot. It was shot on 16MM film in black and white over two days while Hess was a student at Brigham Young University in 2002. Ava DuVernay's short film "Saturday Night Life" follows a single mother and her children as they visit a grocery store. Filmed in 2005, it cost approximately $13,000 from soup to nuts. The original short film version of "Whiplash" by Damien Chazelle, premiered at Sundance in 2013 and was produced for an estimated $23,000. The short's success greenlit the feature which was made for approximately $3.3M and grossed over $50M. Mix in a little math for inflation and we're looking at short film budgets of approximately $875, $21,000, and $31,200, respectively. | 
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